jazz
Martin Longley
The Montréal International Jazz Festival's 37th edition presented its accustomed surfeit of gigs, covering the complete range from concert hall spectaculars to small club sessions. A large part of this, the globe's biggest jazzfest, is the massive-scale freebie shows on various outdoor stages. The festival completely takes over Montréal's downtown centre, which just happens to be this French-speaking city’s cultural area. These streets and plazas are already full of venues, from theatres to clubs, with a wide range of audience capacities to suit both the mainstream and the maverick.As if the Read more ...
peter.quinn
Copenhagen-born bassist Jasper Høiby moved to London in 2000 to attend the Royal Academy of Music. In 2005 he created the trio Phronesis which has toured extensively in Europe and North America and won awards for Jazz Album of the Year in Jazzwise and MOJO for its 2010 album, Alive, as well as a London Jazz Award for its "Pitch Black" performance at Brecon Jazz festival in 2012.Høiby has performed and recorded with a number of artists including Mark Guiliana, Django Bates, Shai Maestro, Julian Joseph, Kurt Elling, Tom Arthurs, Mark Lockheart, Liam Noble, Julia Biel, Marius Neset, Kairos 4tet Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Few new releases come with quite such a specific technical claim as this double release from British saxophonist John Martin. His album title refers to his incorporation of multiphonics, an established technique in free improvisation, within his 11 new tonal compositions, which are in other respects from a recognisable idiom of contemporary jazz, often flavoured with a country and Latin tinge.Martin’s originality is explorative rather than explosive, and this double release, with the quintet he created for the London Jazz Festival of 2014, reveals a technique of infinite subtlety and a Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Thirty-three minutes is not long for an album. What actually counts is not length but what is said and its impact. Norway’s Hedvig Mollestad Trio know what they are doing and over Black Stabat Mater’s 33 minutes they do it with such clarity, force and panache there is no need to say any more. This is exactly what an album should be: a coherent statement.The title is a feint. Hedvig Mollestad Trio’s fourth album does not sound like Black Sabbath. There are guitar riffs: heavy, pounding, pulsing riffs. They employ a one-string style similar to the soloing of Sabbath’s Tony Iommi. But Mollestad’ Read more ...
peter.quinn
Ludic, ironic, kaleidoscopic, highly stylised, this follow-up to the Elliot Galvin Trio’s acclaimed 2014 debut, Dreamland, packs an exhilarating feast for the ears into its shortish 38-minute time frame. Like that greatest of musical magpies, Igor Stravinsky, who was able to creatively distort any style that appealed to him, from medieval music to the music of the Second Viennese School, Galvin similarly dips in at will to the endless resources of jazz, classical and pop music history to create a sound-world entirely his own. Punch, the trio’s debut for Edition Records, sees the pianist Read more ...
Thomas Rees
“Can you take a picture of us looking really middle-aged?”Two woman in their forties are enjoying the sunshine on the opening afternoon of Love Supreme, sipping prosecco from the comfort of their fold-up camping chairs as a charismatic, vapour-voiced Lianne La Havas launches into “Unstoppable”. I watch them scroll through the photos I’ve taken and collapse into fits of giggles. The funny thing is though, they fit right in. They’re doing this festival as it was meant to be done.The fold-up camping chair is the unofficial emblem of Love Supreme – the leitmotif for the weekend. They’re Read more ...
Thomas Rees
£100 – £175 is a lot of money to pay for two hours of music, but that’s what it cost to see Pat Metheny at Ronnie Scott’s this week. The guitar great is in town with his new quartet, a dream team comprising British pianist Gwilym Simcock, bassist Linda Oh (a major name on the New York scene who I first saw performing with Joe Lovano and Dave Douglas’ Sound Prints quintet) and drummer Antonio Sánchez, a long-time Metheny collaborator and the composer of the acclaimed score to Alejandro González Iñárritu's Birdman.Shoehorned in at the bar, with the rest of the club packed to the rafters, I Read more ...
joe.muggs
Around the turn of the millennium, two producers – the Californian Otis Jackson Jr aka Madlib, and the late James Yancey aka J Dilla from Detroit – started a revolution in hip hop: knocking beat patterns off the musical grid, searching further and wider than before for obscure and psychedelic sample sources, and generally making things weird and wonky.This abstracted approach is only now really making its mark on the mainstream thanks to Kanye West and Kendrick Lamar, but it has also created a well-established underground known simply as “the beat scene”, where producers from LA to Saint Read more ...
peter.quinn
Compered by Jazzwise magazine’s gregarious editor-in-chief, Jon Newey, the winners of this year's Parliamentary Jazz Awards were announced last night in the Terrace Pavilion at the House of Commons.Now in their twelfth year, the Awards, organised by the All Party Parliamentary Jazz Appreciation Group (APPJAG) and sponsored by the music licensing company PPL, are one of the most important dates in the UK jazz calendar.In his opening speech, Newey cited both the ups and downs of the previous year, with the former including “more excellent young jazz musicians emerging and carving out spaces at Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
I find myself incredibly conflicted by a musician like Gregory Porter. Is my lack of response to his effortlessly soulful voice (the “liquid spirit”, perhaps, of the 2013 Grammy-award winning album of the same name) a symptom of some sort of emotional lack, or a product of the music itself being, objectively, pretty dull? Crossover appeal thanks to last year’s hit collaboration with UK dance duo Disclosure means cross-genre review assignments, so forgive me if I’ve simply missed the point, but for an album that boasts as many as eight jazz musicians and vocalists at times, Take Me to the Read more ...
peter.quinn
A diverse mix of musicians from the worlds of jazz, blues, soul and beyond were honoured at the third Jazz FM Awards on Tuesday night, which took place in the 1920s art-deco setting of London’s Bloomsbury Ballroom.Hosted by writer, actor and broadcaster Hardeep Singh Kohli, and produced by Serious, the ceremony featured performances from Kansas Smitty’s House Band, Liv Warfield, rising star singer/pianist Kandace Springs, and Hiatus Kaiyote. Guest presenters included Cerys Matthews, Nitin Sawhney, Soweto Kinch, plus Simon Bartholomew and Andrew Levy from the Brand New Heavies. Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Catching the essence of the mercurial, secretive and notoriously abrasive Miles Davis on film might reasonably be described as a mission impossible, but Don Cheadle has put his heart and soul into it. He directed it and plays the title role, he co-wrote the screenplay with Steven Baigelman, and he put some of his own money into it. A jazz saxophonist since his youth, he took tips from Wynton Marsalis about playing the trumpet for the movie.The results are both better and worse than you might have expected. Cheadle succeeds remarkably well at embodying Davis in the different periods in his Read more ...